Bob Cringeley makes a bold statement in a blog post responding to Apple's iCloud announcement: "Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows." He says, "The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn't about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps."

Mobile Me / iWork.com was a disaster. They came to the realisation that web apps don't work in a closed platform. They probably spent thousands of man hours re-implementing a crap ton of stuff in HTML/JS and realised that with browsers being so inconsistent and broken, it would forever be a lost battle. They could never implement and then maintain an OS X app and a web app with the same functionality.

The release of iWork for iPhone shows them pulling themselves back on track. iWork.com will be ditched soon and the MobileMe web interface will linger around for a while and then be ditched too.

Apple believe that the best user experience can never be web apps because the web isn't good enough as a developer platform in their eyes. They have now turned the ship around and are going to be going full steam ahead into their new direction -- the replacement of the web with an API-constricted appstore and apps.